GorillaFACS: The Facial Action Coding System for the Gorilla spp.

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is an objective observation tool for measuring human facial behaviour. It avoids subjective attributions of meaning by objectively measuring independent movements linked to facial muscles, called Action Units (AUs). FACS has been adapted to 11 other taxa, including most apes, macaques and domestic animals, but not yet gorillas.

Prolonged or perpetual growth of replacement teeth in the rock hyrax.

Tusks are ever-growing teeth present in mammals of the clade Paenungulata. Unlike the perpetually growing incisors of rodents, tusks are not used in mastication, and in at least some paenungulatans, the tusk is composed of dentin alone in adults. Few studies have provided tissue-level information on tusks of adult paenungulatans with embedding techniques that identify epithelial and other soft tissues.

Memory-based predictions prime perceptual judgments across head turns in immersive, real-world scenes.

Each view of our environment captures only a subset of our immersive surroundings. Yet, our visual experience feels seamless. A puzzle for human neuroscience is to determine what cognitive mechanisms enable us to overcome our limited field of view and efficiently anticipate new views as we sample our visual surroundings.

Evolutionary divergence of facial muscle physiology between domestic dogs and wolves.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are descended from gray wolf (Canis lupus) populations that inhabited Western Europe and Siberia. The specific timing of dog domestication is debated, but archeological and genetic evidence suggest that it was a multi-phase process that began at least 15,000 years ago. There are many morphological differences between dogs and wolves, including marked divergence in facial muscle morphology, but we know little about the comparative physiology of these muscles.

BMP4-Induced Suppression of Breast Cancer Metastasis Is Associated with Inhibition of Cholesterol Biosynthesis.

We reported previously that in preclinical models, BMP4 is a potent inhibitor of breast cancer metastasis and that high BMP4 protein levels predict favourable patient outcomes. Here, we analysed a breast cancer xenograft with or without enforced expression of BMP4 to gain insight into the mechanisms by which BMP4 suppresses metastasis. Transcriptomic analysis of cancer cells recovered from primary tumours and phosphoproteomic analyses of cancer cells exposed to recombinant BMP4 revealed that BMP4 inhibits cholesterol biosynthesis, with many genes in this biosynthetic pathway being downregulated by BMP4.